We played it at Downbeat, and it totally went off.” Pressing up a stack of white label 12-inches, Evelyn and Harper released “Dextrous” (alongside “Let It Roll” and two versions of a third track, “Stating a Fact”) under their own, one-off Poverty Records imprint, and trawled it around record shops acrossYorkshire. One of these was FON Records in Sheffield—soon to become the launchpad for a label that would change everything for electronic music in the North of England, and beyond. - WARP SPEED - - AHEAD - It was in Sheffield, home of electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire and Human League, where the Northern dance movement truly began to coalesce. Located above one of the city’s many old metalworks, FON Studios—it stood for Fuck Off Nazis—had become a focal point of the city’s music scene following its founding in 1985 by members of industrial funk outfit Chakk. An offshoot of the studio, the FON record store on Division Street in the city center would become the premier outlet for homegrown Northern dance sounds, with Jive Turkey DJ Winston Hazel heading up the dance and import section. Hazel, along with FON Studios engineer Robert Gordon and mutual friend Sean Maher, would soon make one of the bleep movement’s defining records on a home recording setup (Akai S1000 sampler, Korg M1 synthesizer) that Gordon had purchased with checks from his mixing jobs. The Forgemasters’ “Track With No Name” gave FON staffer Steve Beckett, Gordon, and the late Rob Mitchell the push they needed to set up a label to platform this new Northern dance sound. Financed through a government Enterprise Allowance Scheme grant, “Track With No Name”—described by Beckett as “an evocation of the nocturnal energy of an industrial city in decline, whose empty, industrial spaces were being turned into illegal and autonomous party zones”—was the first in a string of seminal bleep anthems on the label, dubbed Warp Records as an acronym for “We Are Reasonable People.” A key testing ground for these raw Northern electronic sounds was a Wednesday-night session in Sheffield at Occasions, formerly Mona Lisa’s, where the Jive Turkey parties had first begun. As it turned out, Nightmares on Wax was already in the mix there.“When I turned up at the FON record store with the EP, the man behind the counter—who turned out to be Steve Beckett—said,‘I’ve heard your tune ‘Dextrous’ down Occasions,’ Evelyn recalls.“‘Winston Hazel has been playing it.’” Soon after, Beckett contacted Evelyn and asked if he and Harper would be interested in remixing “Dextrous” and putting it out on the newly formed Warp. “We went to Rob Gordon’s house [to mix the record],” Evelyn recalls.“He had all this equipment, so it was like
being in a sweet shop.We always had the ear, but we didn’t have the technical knowledge, and that experience gave us that.” Released in November 1989,“Dextrous” was the second 12-inch on Warp, following “Track With No Name,” and preceding Sweet Exorcist’s “Testone” and “LFO” by LFO—four records that sounded immense in the cavernous warehouses of the North of England. “It was NewYear’s Eve 1989, we were at this illegal rave in an old abattoir, and had gone outside to have a smoke—then we heard ‘Dextrous’ come on,” Evelyn remembers. “We ran back inside and, like, ten thousand people [were] going off to our record. And it was the same at the Blackburn raves. It was beyond our comprehension.” “Aftermath,” Nightmares on Wax’s second 12-inch for Warp, followed in October 1990. Sampling “Happiness Is Just Around the Bend” by Cuba Gooding and “Jam on It” by Newcleus, it was, in the words of Matt Annis,“a thrillingly bombastic rush of low-end power and mutantYorkshire funk.” Released in September 1991 on Warp—as all of the outfit’s subsequent releases would be—Nightmares on Wax’s wildly eclectic debut album, A Word of Science: The First and Final Chapter , threw together Evelyn and Harper’s disparate musical influences, from bleep and techno to soul, hip-hop, and jazz. “With that record, it was like, ‘Let’s just tap into everything that has ever influenced us,’” Evelyn explains. “All that digging from over the years came out in the foundations of that album. And, with regard to sampling, there was a real guerrilla mentality at that time.” Teasing the downtempo direction that would define the next phase of Nightmares on Wax, A Word of Science: The First and Final Chapter opened with the horizontal instrumental “Nights Interlude,” which sampled the opening notes of Quincy Jones’s “Summer in the City”—a loop the Pharcyde would use a year later on “Passin’ Me By,” and which Evelyn would revisit at the start of each of his next two albums. - COLLECTIVE - - COMEDOWN - “I already had the idea for Smokers Delight , and was working on ideas for it, well before that first album came out,” Evelyn says of Nightmares on Wax’s second and most influential LP. “It came from going out to parties, then back to friends’ houses. Clubs then finished at 2 a.m. so you would go on to the blues parties that always existed in the hood.Then it was back to friends’ houses, playing music while coming down.” Evelyn credits ambient mavericks the KLF and their 1990 album Chill Out with helping him move his sound forward at this time.“ Chill Out was a huge inspiration to me,” he says.“We had been taking acid and tripping while listening to things by Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd, and pretending like we were revolutionaries living in the ’60s.
70 WaxPoetics
( opposite ) Mixing In a Space Outta Sound with engineer Mike Pela in 2005.
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